Photographs inevitably capture both moments in time and a particular vantage point—a perspective relative to objects in the world, expressing a range of emotions, ideas, or values. But often these images of human beings and human objects, aim to convey emotions, ideas, or values that are equally human. The photographer, a human, communicates a human perspective.
And perhaps this is to some extent inevitable. The camera does not operate itself. An intentional human agent determines what lies within the frame the moment the photograph is exposed, necessarily determining what information will be cast aside. But is it possible, through photography, to attend to the non-human world, to allow it to speak, to re-present it in some way?
Place is more than the background that is captured within the frames of a photograph. Often, communicating place entails conveying a mood, a feeling of what-it-is-like to be somewhere, to inhabit. As a social species, our encounter with place is often shaped in part by our experience of other human beings in it. Together, through our shared language, we construct a sense of what a place means—and this is often what makes somewhere a place, rather than just space; place is space rendered meaningful. It can be difficult to see beyond the values and concepts that inform the human significance of a place.
To ask the question again: Is it possible, through photography, to efface the centrality of human concerns, to stand outside of ourselves, and in this moment of ecstasy (from the Greek exstasis, to stand apart from) to capture a place in a way that allows a place to stand for itself—to communicate something of its otherness, to suspend our tendency to prioritize the use of words and images that render it meaningful on our terms. This is what it means for a place to have a mood: it communicates something to us, something that preceded and always exceeds our ability to name and describe, and something that we can best apprehend in and through this ecstasy, through standing outside of ourselves.
However, one of the hallmarks of the anthropocene is that places no longer speak for themselves. They have been so utterly transformed by human presence; sculpted, redefined, and employed to serve our ends. By this logic, a place has value only insofar as it has utility. Photography too can be yet another anthropocentric pursuit, becoming caught in a self-referencing loop that captures one mode of human meaning in order to construct another—a mode of speaking by humans of humans and for humans. Or, it can try to capture this tension between how human beings utilize places to construct and communicate their own concerns and how a place speaks for itself. These days, I find myself opting to pursue the latter.